ACFE Insights

While millennials are more likely to fall victim to fraud than seniors, the financial losses they suffer are less than half of those suffered by seniors — $400 versus $1,092, respectively — with an annual loss by seniors of approximately $3 billion. The reason for the loss discrepancy: the financial stability of many elderly citizens and the types of frauds perpetrated against them.

Angie Kennard felt that something was off with her 79-year-old father. When they talked on the phone he would tell her about a woman he met online and occasionally sent money to. Even though her father never met the woman in person, she professed her love for him through emails and asked him to send her money to feed her and her daughter. Angie told her father that he was being conned, but he would not listen and continued to send the woman money.

A man and a woman walk up to an ATM located in the back of a small drug store. The machine is tucked away in a seating area for people waiting on prescriptions to be filled. They are dressed as ATM technicians and even have a company logo over the shirt pockets of their uniforms. The man carries a small toolbox, while the woman holds a clipboard.

I vividly remember how I felt on my first date. I was 15 years old (now that I have kids, I don’t know what my parents were thinking letting me go), and my body was still catching up to my forehead. My long-time crush of about two weeks drove to pick me up in a black Pontiac Grand Am that had a white Oakley sticker on the back window. He was one year older and was one of the few boys at my school who had a car…that worked.

In today’s world, it’s not uncommon to see headlines about a new instance of fraud many times a week. Whether it’s a new phishing scam targeting seniors or the arrest of a low-level employee embezzling small amounts from a local government office, most fraud-related issues are interesting to the public regardless of their profession. Since anti-fraud professionals are on the front line of fraud prevention and investigation, it’s also predictable that family and friends may turn to you for clarification of these fraud-related stories.